by Tanith Lee
He had taken the woman for a minor priestess. But apparently she had, like the Olchibe, more than one string to her bow. ‘You seek Winter Tirthen?’
‘I do.’
He thought, And I am the one believed only in God.
But she said, ‘Over that rise the air sometimes lashes and shines. The weather has been better – or worse. Too warm. The fruit trees bloom and shed their fruit. Something has taken Tirthen’s mind off the world.’
Athluan thanked her and went on and looking back five minutes after, as he started up the rise, saw she was no longer by the altar and there was no sign of her on all the open snow. He doubted she could have got to the village that fast.
About twenty paces down the far side of the ridge he saw the shimmer in the air.
A single stone stood up from the ground here, like the ones he had seen before on this continent. They had been many and very tall, and had given off sheets of emerald light. This was a dwarf of its clan and gave no light at all, but even so he sensed its true nature.
Among the other stones Zth had abused Saphay, and Athluan had demoralized and deflected him. And then the stones had themselves chastised Zth with their energies, hurling him at the sky where he disappeared, and from which he did not return.
Athluan bowed to the stone. He pulled off a second silver link – now only one was left: respect could be expensive. He put the link at the foot of the stone, and went on. Stepping straight into the disturbed air he moved through a semblance of a thin curtain. Then he was on a sea shore.
Out there beyond the shore ice the water was indigo blue.
Lapped by the shallows, an icy pyramid went up, and it was cloudy as scratched vitreous. It reminded him of the occultly shaped berg in which he had discovered her the first time, his bride, yet was not exactly the same.
Besides dusk was settling here, while in the previous landscape it had been morning.
Athluan paused to watch as a single full moon sailed up from what must be the east, out over the liquid sea. The sky was congested, nearly dark as the water.
Down the shelving rock he climbed, and so on to the ice fields, feeling as he did all his restored vitality and ability, young enough, old enough. For him maybe thirty had been the flawless age, and wrenched from him too soon in his former life.
Presumably he would have to scale the pyramid. That had been the plot before.
It would give him no difficulty. This body was ready-made nourished, exercised and flexible.
Yet he hesitated.
Instead of setting off at once he watched the solitary moon.
The sky closed about it, any faint star going out. Cloud foamed over, and one of the sky’s mystic firmamental incidents happened.
A single shaft of moonlight speared down, catching the icy pyramid in its ray. The impression then was of a tower, solid at its base and less so above. And directly overhead in the cloud mass the moon still smokily glowed.
Athluan recollected a legend of a Jafn hero, not the famous Kind Heart or more famous Star Black. This man was a warrior of the ranks, but yet he had found in a moon shaft the white platform and garth of a gler that had molested his people the Jafn Klow. Entering the shaft he had met and killed it.
This then was an omen.
Surely even an immortal might receive one?
Before the shaft of brilliance faded Athluan ran along the shore. Reaching the pyramid’s base, flaming in the moon, he sprang. He ascended the roughened quartz side with ease, not even really needing the precautionary two knives he pushed in and out and in to aid his purchase.
At the moment he reached the top the moon and cloud altered. A splatter of white-blue stars appeared further over to the south. They described he thought exactly the form of a beast, some sort of lion, but was not certain.
Athluan pressed his face high up to the pyramid’s sloping side. It was more clear this high, and in this area it was like a window. He saw.
‘Face of God.’
But it was not the face of God, down there in the ice. Nor a woman’s face as at the first.
What he beheld was Saphay below, locked in a sexual embrace with a black-haired being. Her delight was unmistakable, as was her unhuman partner’s. No mortal might intrude, compete, draw near. No, not even an immortal.
‘Enough.’
It was not shouted. There was no need to shout.
One vibrant kick had smashed in the apex of the ice, and he had leapt down the space, thirty shield-lengths, maybe sixty, with the confidence of all he had become. Nor did his body fail him. He landed on his feet without any hurt or hesitation, beside the tumbled couch. They paid no attention, did not seem to see or hear.
The air was spiced and tingling – musical – from their pleasure.
He brushed that off him and spoke the one clear stern word.
Saphay opened her eyes. Everything else left her instantly, he noted, except for knowledge and dismay.
She was like any wife in life or story caught out with the neighbouring Chaiord. In the stories the cuckolded husband would then plunge his sword through both their adulterous bodies, cipher for the other betrayed weapon.
Athluan, though he had come armed from the Holasan-garth, did not draw the sword.
Instead he put his hand on the shoulder of the amorous god and with one wrench pulled him free of all contact. It must have been uncomfortable for both parties, even painful. Yet with gods, who could say?
Tirth spun away and as he spun a blizzard enclosed him, in which he stabilized fully clothed, not a hair out of place.
‘Unwise,’ said Tirth. Another unique word.
‘Wise,’ answered Athluan.
‘In fact not. I shall dispose of you now.’
‘She,’ said Athluan, ‘has made me eternal. You though she’s partially defrosted.’ He folded his arms. ‘Try if you like. I’ll wait.’
Tirth came at him then. That was, screaming snow and wind and needles of ice came at him. Athluan stood there immovable. What did this count for? He had been slain by a snow-wind much worse than this, full of lethal animates that tore him in pieces. This blast struck Athluan, his body, his face, slapped in at his eyes like bits of glass. But he withstood it, stood it, then ceased to stand for it at all. Shouldering through the mob of the blizzard he reached the entity Tirthen, which still somewhat resembled a handsome man.
In that moment Athluan perceived the god’s basic unvalue.
He thought of the lighted stones and Zth, and crashed his fist into Tirthen’s face. Winter was catapulted once more across the chamber of the pyramid and, striking the lower wall, flew right through it. Huge ice-works came down. A jagged dark hole with night in it and waspish whitish weather was the result.
Tirth did not return indoors. And above the open triangular chimney of the iceberg surged and grunted, threatening to fall in.
‘Now you’ll come with me,’ said Athluan. He did not glance at her.
Saphay sounded mortified. ‘You took too long.’
‘Oh? I thought a woman preferred her lover to take his time.’
‘Don’t play with Jafn lewdness – or Rukarian sophistry. How dare you mumble that to me? All that trek I had to find you – and then you a child – and putting you in the vitalizing fire – and then how long I must wait. Again. Years I’ve waited for all this curse to be solved. And you, dawdling in the flame, like bread that wouldn’t – oh yes, now a lewd pun – rise; too lazy to wake up—’
Without turning, Athluan smiled. The theatre of this was not lost on him. He used a voice like a battle-cry. ‘Get up. Now do as I say. I’m sick of your Rukar whinging, woman.’
‘You—’ The fury in her perished.
Outside, her previous precious inamorato flailed and curdled on the night. Useless, all of them. Son, husband, lovers – men.
But she left the couch, which anyway by now was a heap of uneven ice. Once upright on the floor she was immediately washed, dried, brushed, combed and scented with Paradise. Her whiteness h
ad sheathed itself in a suitable gown. Even she was taken by slight confusion, realizing the garment was in the Jafn style.
Although he was not, she sensed Athluan was laughing, there under the play-act of his rage.
A silly smile upturned her lips. She erased it.
‘I am ready,’ she said softly, behind him.
And she walked behind him too, angered at it, yet tickled and laughing at it also, marvelling and nearly weeping, full of every contradiction that any woman in love might feel and know.
Past the collapsing pyramid, whole storeys of which were now bursting in the black, moving sea, no trace of the Winter god was to be seen.
Above wretched Ddir, rearranger of stars, had put up a ridiculous effigy of some animal, part lion, part wolf – ah yes. A lionwolf …
‘Where will we go?’ she murmured.
‘Where I say.’
‘Very well then,’ she said. The smile fluttered on her mouth again and she did not resist.
They trod across the sheet of snow, not climbing up the rock, only skirting the ice fields and the sea.
After a mile she said, almost inaudibly, ‘I’m cold, Athluan.’
She was, but only because she had allowed it. She did not need to be cold, nor care if she was.
‘Soon it will be Summer,’ he said, perversely perhaps.
‘Not for a century at least.’
‘Then this is Spring.’
She had never heard that term before, not as such. How clever, she thought, that the barbarian Jafn had language for an interim condition, as Ice Age gave way to ordinary seasons. Though their speech did contain more than one language, was quite clever …
And it was true. Irises inked black-blue through the ice. Nearby a hump of tree had removed its glacial coat, its black leaves unfurling like eager hands.
It occurred to her she might be drawn back to placate the entity of Winter now and then. It was not real infidelity. It would be part of her function to deflect his – its – powers. She mused on this with a strange innocence.
Probably Athluan knew as much too. Would he be incensed?
But she was the goddess of day, and Summer day at that.
As she walked, in deep silence, she began to remember her son.
His image had been fused up there on the tapestry of night, but did this mean she would certainly see him again? By now, to see him seemed impossible. So long to wait – you have made me wait – a child, a child in fire growing quick as a plant in sunlight – but he had been a baby, Lionwolf. She had borne him, and then—
Her mind moved suddenly from him and fixed its total attention on her husband, striding before her. All she could see or think was him, and how the cloak swung from his shoulders, his pale hair, the sound of his light breathing.
It was as if she had not seen him before. Now she did. And with that revelation came an overwhelming consciousness of loss. This halted her. It seemed like the sinking of her heart’s own sun.
Never before had she felt it, evaluated it, known it. Not any other loss, but this loss, this: Athluan’s death, there in the Klowan-garth so long before. When it had happened she had been only afraid, if rightly so, for herself and her child. Now years, far more, had run away, and the pain reached her blazing, as if one of Ddir’s farthest stars fell towards her and crushed her where she stood.
‘You died,’ she said, staring at the earth. ‘You were killed and they brought you home in your chariot, for tradition, and you turned blue in your chair in the hall and decayed, but you weren’t there and there was no one, no one – and I – and you – Athluan …’ she sang in lament. And sinking on her knees she began to cry the long-ago widowhood of her youth and her mortality.
Athluan turned then and came back to her. He lifted her up into his arms.
‘And now I’m here. Because of you, goddess, I shan’t die again either in this world.’
But she only cried, holding on to him, crying, crying.
Behind them both now, above a slope, out of one external half-world and into another perhaps, Jafn warriors waited for Athluan, riding-masks pushed back from faces. Their hawks ruffled their feathers, and the well-trained dogs stood on the snow. The lions that drew the chariots did not make a sound, save when the last whisper of the snow-wind chinked their harness and the beads in their manes.
Athluan thought stilly, This woman bore the brunt of all our beginning. What has been begun was begun through her alone.
Her recent adultery meant nothing to him. He too foresaw it might now and then be repeated, in order to defuse the energies of the cold. Another myth, purposeful yet weightless.
In the end, her tears ceased.
She said to him once more, ‘Where will we go?’
‘Home,’ he said, ‘to the Klowan-garth.’
‘But the Klow—’
‘Are gone. Not here, sweetheart. Here they live. Give me your hand. I have my own place yet, and you’re a goddess. Not till time’s ending will we be separated, or suffer. Maybe not even then. Is that the vow you want from me?’
‘Yes. Take me home.’
There had never been a home, save there, she thought, in the barbaric and despised Jafn garth. Before that the unloved, unloving, impoverished corner of a palace in Ru Karismi, later a host of spots and spate of journeys, and she on her own, even when she had thought herself among companions. He had told her, they had been meant to love and had no space to accomplish it. As he now dismissed her coming ritual infidelities, so she ignored the immateriality of this re-creation they would go to.
Together they stepped up the slope.
The night undid itself there; paleness and brightness rode through. And then they were all of them gone, gone to their own place, to torchlight and black wine and a lamp that would darken on one side, to the joyhall and the songs and the upper room, and the young lions and the stripy hawks, and the coming of the day, and of Spring.
TWO
Just before the sun had fully set that particular evening, the great whale Brightshade had been basking on some distant shore, this time in his complete regalia of psyche and physical body.
Zeth Zezeth was anticipating returning into his heaven and finding there Jemhara, irresistibly awaiting him. And this now was his final visit to Brightshade. Although, at the hour of performing the visit, Zth did not know how final.
Here was the coast of Kraagparia, the land from which the Kraag had long departed. Only Brightshade was there now. And the dull sun was descending inland, making the snow-hills black and the icy shore rich red.
Having brought himself to it Brightshade too was waiting for Zth. He flexed his massive, comparatively for him small, fore-limbs, tossed the last sun on his horn. In the fishy forests on his back things slithered, twittered.
Brightshade was aware Zth would be arriving. Maybe he had drawn Zth to him to settle the business between them. The whale was no longer afraid.
No, even when the fire-arrow of Zth’s advent marked the orange-red dusk.
Zth touched down.
‘Well,’ said Zth speaking very beautifully, gleaming with malice, ‘here you are, as ever. Idle. Did I not give you tasks?’
Brightshade talked in a fine coined voice, an innovation which startled Zth.
‘You may take your tasks and chew on them, Pth.’
The deliberate mispronunciation of his mighty father’s name’s first consonant was extremely insulting. Did the Sun Wolf try to tell himself it had been due to the whale’s infancy in words? Or to whalish nerves?
‘You rouse yourself to rudeness, you cretinous hulk, do you?’ Zth let loose a golden bolt of electric pain. It slashed across Brightshade’s body.
Another wonder. Brightshade had himself released a shape of thought. It formed instant armour all about him. Though the ice cracked and the sea reared, Brightshade was unharmed. He lay there and looked at his evil parent, and let the essence of the armouring shape show itself to Zth, freestyle but unmissable. Lionwolf, said the shape. Lionwolf my br
other, and my loving ally.
Zth let go his equilibrium. Violence and lights flashed round him. He shrieked his malevolence. Through the tornado of insane rage small phrases sliced. ‘So you make up to him? So you think he can match me? So you think you can match me? I will take every fleck of you apart and cast the fragments into nothingness.’ But despite all that the whale lay there, smiling. The missiles bounced off him to hit land or sea or sky.
Only the earth took any damage. An ice-forest above the shore was burning. A real tornado started to brew between water and atmosphere.
High overhead a curious star formation had begun to show a lionish animal, which winked on and off as inflamed cloud raced over it.
‘Now I kill you.’ Zth, prancing.
‘Oh, Pth, Pth,’ said Brightshade. ‘I have only to call my darling brother. Shall I do that? When he comes he will do for you.’
Zth rushed along the frozen beach. He seemed not to grasp his face was in a rictus of fright, let alone that he was running away. To Zth, already much more than three-quarters a deic lunatic, the retreat seemed actually mere boredom at being with his second son.
Zth naturally would murder Brightshade. He would blast him into atoms and seed the clouds with him, and for days and nights it would snow whale. But first there was something more pressing … what was it? Yes, yes, Zth must punish the coast.
Definitely the Kraag were gone. But other people had here and there moved into the land’s interstices. They were fishers or herders, sometimes nomadic like the Urrowiy of the northern North.
Night was now fully present, only one ribbon of non-colour dissolving over the land. Three moons had come up, each some way behind the other. And each only the most transparent crescent. The stars that displayed the legendary Gech lionwolf beast had grown more bright.
Zth Zzth ploughed along the coastline, stitching it to the ocean.
Jemhara, still then alive, was observing through her spyhole in heaven. She had not fully understood what happened next. She had seen only that he let loose some virulent strike that had no excuse, was ‘unforgivable’. This act of his now about to take place would decide her on her ultimate action, and she would therefore seduce the god, impair him beyond recovery, and herself die.
